Breyland Notes: Ultra-Christianity the Final Temptation

Remove the Traitor, Bleed the Cuck, Free the Nations. Vengeance is the Lord’s we are but his instruments.

Motto of the Holy Order of St. Brevik.

I’m clearly overthinking this but I’ve run into a rather hilarious writer’s problem. One of the core elements of the Breyland stories is going to be the constant struggle between the Celtic Pagan majority and the large Christian majority for the cultural and philosophical soul of the nation. The single greatest fear of the Breyland patriot is that of a religious civil war tearing apart the Homeworld just as their colonies and allies abandon them. While such a war is unlikely, it could happen and lingers over the political landscape like the sword of Damocles.

This means the religious landscape is going to be far more important then I had originally imagined. The vague handwaved notions of Energetic New Age-y Celtic Pagans and Stoic Steady Determined Christians I had five years ago simply aren’t going to cut the mustard. I need to actually sit down and work out what are the major sects? and how do they interact?

Somewhere around this time I learnt that the Saxons around the time of the migration viewed Christ as a warrior god who had conquered Death. Which I suppose is definitely one way to look at it. So I incorporated that idea into a vaguely defined “Church of the Warrior” a militant sect of Christianity popular among the military. Since this was about the time I was losing my own faith I sort of left it at that and didn’t think any further on the idea.

Several years and many, many red pills later I’m picking the idea back up and finding the Church of the Warrior to be actually rather tame and not anything I can get a reader to be alarmed about. What I need is a church so outrageous, so hardcore and unforgiving as to be a legitimate threat to the status quo; with centuries long history and absolutely no doubt to the righteousness of their cause. A group so hardcore that they border on heresy but without going into cartoony supervillan strawman territory like the Masadans in David Weber’s Honor Harrington series. The Church Militant and Unrepentant needs to be both a hyper-competent threat to the heroes and a moral temptation. The temptation of course is to join them, for is not their cause righteous? Do we not seek the salvation of the nations? Must the works of Satan not be opposed? Did we not save Western Civilization once before?

The looming tidal wave of Reconquista 2.0 is causing a great deal of havoc with my original timeline. Predicting the future is always tricky but the problem is that while I know something is going to happen I don’t know the scale of the event or how much it will alter the fictional plans. A maximum scale Reconquista 2.0 event would leave a huge mark on human history (continent sized ethnic cleansing wars will tend to do that.) The rapid growth and entrenchment of a church like the CMU and the Templar style orders that would be created during such a conflict would simply not go away afterwards. So it makes perfect sense to keep an element or two around a couple millennium later. If we’re still talking about the Romans, there’s a good chance the Breylanders might still be talking about us.

The Church Militant and Unrepentant is going to be a special challenge to flesh out as no matter what I do to make them extreme and “they go too far” I can’t help shake the feeling that most of my internet friends and potential reader base would immediately join such a church if it existed. For the lulz as much as for salvation.

Assassin-monks calling themselves the Order of St. Brevik?

Hey it could happen? And isn’t speculative fiction supposed to be about speculation?

Related: Musing about the effect of feral pigs as a ecological threat.